Barclays Capital has increased its staff by 30% to 7,000 in the past 18 months - and there's more to come. The objectives - more client contact and a broader product range - seem to be attainable. What's not so clear is whether increased revenues will outweigh the costs of this headlong expansion and how it will transform the firm's culture.

Pension funds welcome a new bond indexed to life expectancy which should cut the cost of matching a growing risk.

The market for Shariah-compliant finance has grown rapidly in size and sophistication in the past few years, demanding expertise in regulation, product structuring, legal services and marketing. Nigel Dudley speaks to pioneers of the industry.

Will Cazenove's blue-blood culture and exclusive corporate clientele be under threat in its joint venture with JPMorgan? Rivals would like to think so but the two parties are aware of how crucial these features are. What's more, there's nowhere much else for top corporate customers to go. The biggest danger is that the merged firm will cater for so many blue chips in such sectors as mining that conflicts of interest might emerge.

Macquarie Securities' Baywatch-themed relaunch party at London's exclusive rooftop bar, Coq d'Argent, received a cool reception from some guests and not just because of the un-Baywatch like winter weather. The hosts, who were more modestly dressed than most of Baywatch's former cast members such as Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff, had told guests to expect Australian pop diva Kylie Minogue to make an appearance later in the evening.

Korea

From unlikely roots, US private-equity investor Lombard has deftly re-invented itself to emerge as a leading local value investor in Asia. It has some way to go before it has truly regional scope but an unconventional approach to investing has yielded impressive results to date.

Banks are trying, with mixed success so far, to interest institutional investors in structured products based on funds of hedge funds and hedge fund indices. For institutions that have been slow to obtain approval for alternative investments, structured products offer a quick fix. But suspicion abounds.

When readers of Physics World recently voted for their favourite equations, it was no surprise when Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetism theory, which established the link between magnetism and electricity, topped the poll. Maxwell's 1873 classic beat strong competition from the likes of Einstein's e=mc2, and Pythagoras's a2 + b2 = c2. But the poll also sounded a word of warning for investors. Schrödinger's equation (HY = EY), which finished fifth in the poll, was devised by Erwin Schrödinger in the 1920s to explain how sub-atomic particles like electrons behave. As such, Cambridge, UK-based company quantumBEAM decided to design its radical optical communications technology around Schrödinger's work.